Whether you loved it or hated it, ‘Torchwood: Miracle Day’ has the ability to provoke intense emotions among ‘Torchwood’ fans. It was bad enough when in ‘Torchwood: Children of Earth’ fan favorite Ianto met his demise and now with the team out of Wales and placed in America, ‘Miracle Day’ felt that the magic of what made ‘Torchwood’ the show that it was disappeared. Apparently fans weren’t the only ones who felt that way as Chris Chibnall, one of the main writers during the first two seasons of the series, felt that way too.

Chibnall joined the ‘Torchwood’ writing team from the very beginning of its inception and in an interview with Starburst Magazine, he recalls how he became involved with ‘Torchwood,’ an experience he describes as a “once in a lifetime thing”:

“Julie Gardner [executive producer of ‘Doctor Who’ alongside Russell T. Davies] said, “Come and have a drink,” and we went to this Private Members’ Club in London and she said, “We have to sit in the corner because there’s this secret thing.” It was like all executive producers always do: “I have a secret thing to tell you; it’s very important.” And then in this case… She said, “We’re going to do a 9 o’clock spin-off of Doctor Who. Do you want to do it?” and I said, “What?” That was really out of the blue, really unexpected. There was no sense that there were going to be spin-offs. She just said, “We’re going to do a show, a spin-off of Doctor Who, it’s going to be featuring Captain Jack, it’s going to be much more grown-up.” So that was the first I’d heard of it, and that took me really by surprise.”

Chibnall left the series after the second season in order to set up ‘Law and Order: UK,’ and although Davies and Gardner tried to persuade him to return for ‘Children of Earth’, Chibnall had to turn it down:

“When I was setting up ‘Law & Order: UK’, Russell and Julie kept saying, “Just come and do this little five-parter, and write this with Russell.” So no, I had to turn that down a few times. I don’t regret it at all. I mean I think it’s brilliant and I think it’s the best iteration of Torchwood. But it also destroys everything about Torchwood; in order to make it work, you have to destroy the things that we were writing for, for two series: you destroy the Hub, you put them on the run, there’s no real sense of the Rift. So in a way, it’s a totally different format. And that’s what makes it work so brilliantly.”

While Chibnall thought ‘Children of Earth’ was brilliantly done, he’s not as generous with ‘Torchwood: Miracle Day.’ In the early days before the idea of the series was pitched to several networks, Chibnall did do some storyboarding with Davies and states somewhere along the line “it sort of lost a little bit of its Torchwood-ness”:

“Whether you like or dislike Torchwood, it has an essence – of madness and cheekiness and sexiness, and fun and darkness, those sort of polar facets of what it’s about, of putting those things together – and somehow it lost a bit of that somewhere in the process. When we were first talking about it, it was something a bit bolder, a bit cheekier. it may just come back to the fact that one of the great essences of Torchwood was taking those American tropes and doing them in Wales. And in a way, that’s what made Torchwood so brilliantly odd. Once you put it in California, it becomes more like other shows.”

And what does he think of a ‘Torchwood’ return?

“It’s entirely down to Russell. I would expect he will have other things he’ll want to write, to be honest.”

While this may not be the news ‘Torchwood’ fans may have wanted to hear, it’s not anything that hasn’t been said before. Davies himself stated that the series was “not officially” cancelled and that “it’s in a nice limbo where it can stew – those shows can come back in 10, 20 years’ time.”

Janice Kay

Janice's first memories of the genre were of watching the original 'Star Trek' and classic 'Doctor Who' episodes (Tom Baker, aka the Fourth Doctor, was her first). Soon, she was introduced to 'Godzilla' and her addiction then spread to books, magazines, movies and comics. Janice continued as a closet geek as her thirst and love for sci-fi grew and was only second to her love of baking. Then one night, on a whim, she answered a tweet to be a writer for ScienceFiction.com and the geek girl insider her was soon set free. Within 3 years she became the Senior Editor for the site. When not writing or editing for ScienceFiction.com, Janice is scouring the internet to feed her sci-fi cravings while defending conspiracy theories, protecting scientific theorems and loving all things science fiction.... and baking cookies.

Chibnall is absolutely right about CoE, but this is really only going to add more fuel to the Miracle Day hate-fire, which puts Espenson right back in the flames, and she’s far too good of writer to deserve that.

Honestly, I loved Torchwood Miracle Day. Torchwood is my favorite show, and while I do agree that it was very different, I do not agree that it lost any of its Torchwood-ness. There was a supernatural crisis that effected the entire world, there was use of Torchwood Tech, there were glimpses of Jack’s past, and at the end, Rex ended up having the same life/death problem as Jack. Honestly, I don’t understand what everyone’s complaining about. It was a great series.

I agree with Chibnall completely here. CoE was brilliant and Miracle day was terrible. Espenson may be a good writer – in fact I like most of her work – however she must have been having a naff day when she wrote for Torchwood because this series was undeniably tedious and considerably ‘un-torchwoody’

Torchwood ended with COE for me. As far as I am concenred MD was not TW. Moving foward there is no incarnation of Tw I will watch that has Rex or Gwen as the main leads. John Barrowman was pushed out of his own show. It was appalling from first to last moments. All we have left is Gwen. She was never a great character but when supported by the rest of the cast she was bearable. I cant see it continuing with just her. Barrowman was badly treated in this as the star i would have expected the show to revolve around him instead it was Rex. He just became more loathsome the more air time he took. So TW RIP I cant see it being recreated. MD should never have happened, better Tw had died on a high note of COE.